


How to Train Your Defective SIR Unit

by Grisly_Goober



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: All Irkens have the capacity to love and I will die on this hill, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Is it canon divergent if the finale was never produced?, Oneshot?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 12:02:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21074582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grisly_Goober/pseuds/Grisly_Goober
Summary: Tenn deals with the wreckage caused by the SIR’s sent to her. One of them catches her attention.





	How to Train Your Defective SIR Unit

**Author's Note:**

> I admit, I’m a little fixated with exploring the emotions of all Irkens that interest me. Skoodge and Zim are mocked by the higher-ups in the Irken Empire, but what about the emotions of someone more respectable, like Tenn? I need to know!

Invader Tenn was not angry that she was mistakenly gifted with several malfunctioning SIR units. She was not angry that they had eaten her base and nearly got her captured. She wasn’t even angry that the Tallest had dismissed her from her now failed mission and that she had to wait until the next Impending Doom to prove herself to the Irken Empire.

She was furious. 

But she didn’t know where her current emotions should be directed. The Tallest, for possibly messing up their shipment requests, and then basically punishing Tenn for enduring their own mistake, “Invader” Zim, for apparently requesting the faulty SIR units at the same time she was being shipped her mech, or the little mechanical bastards that somehow followed her to the panic chamber.

The Tallest weren’t here...

Neither was Zim...

So that left the broken SIRs as the only immediate outlet for Tenn’s rage. Faulty SIR units needed to be dismantled, after all.

“You cost me my GLORY!” She screeched as she grabbed one of the SIR’s by their antennae and slammed it face down into the ground.

“I had the Tallest’s respect! Do you know how rare that is, for someone as short as me?!” She swung the now-broken SIR into its squealing brethren.

“You were supposed to be a thing of pure destruction! A gift from the Tallest themselves!” She grabbed a running SIR unit and tore off its limbs one by one.

“I don’t deserve this!” She threw all the broken SIR’s into a pile and bashed them in with a broken support beam that had fallen during the chaos. 

Once they’d all stopped moving, she knelt down and screamed, like she had for the past hour. She wasn’t sure if her own functioning SIR was in that pile, she’d just known she saw the others grab it by the arms and eat the contents they found in its head, affectively terminating it.

She’d grown to like that SIR. Even if it was taboo to get emotionally attached, she couldn’t help it. The Irken Empire May have found a way to reproduce artificially and ban the old way of starting a family naturally, but there were some Irkens that yearned for familial affection, or any kinship at all, looking for it desparately in a simple computer. Those Irkens, like Tenn, kept to themselves knowing they’d be accused of having defective feelings. But Tenn, and all those other Irkens, knew deep inside that these feelings were natural- But the Empire was law, and therefore, they’d have to stuff down their own feelings as much as they could.

Tenn began to salvage anything that looked like it could work, and set it aside in a scrap pile to use as spare parts for her now wrecked Voot-Runner; She’d have to get off this planet before the Meekrobs started paying too much attention to the giant pile of rubble in the middle of nowhere. She took one look at the pile of SIR remains, and scoffed. Worthless defects..

She manually tore a broken door off to see what she could find in her armory, when she heard loud, metallic clattering, followed by a high, shrill voice scream, “SURPRISE!”

Tenn whipped around instinctively, and stilled when she saw one of the defective SIR’s standing in the middle of the pile of its dead brethren wearing a cracked smile with it’s arms wide open. It’s eyes glowed pink. The sight filled her with fury.

“Surprise?” She repeated as she stalked towards it, “Do you know what kind of position you’re in?”

“Yeah! I was hidin’ while you were stompin’ around killin’ everyone. I won! I’m the best hider!” It squealed.

Tenn slowed in her tracks. This SIR unit was obviously incredibly stupid, but it seemed to be smarter than its brothers. Or at least, smart enough to speak.

“Do you even know what you’ve done?!” She demanded, “You destroyed my base!”

“Aw, I’m sorry, Master..” the SIR unit said sadly, looking down with those pink eyes.

Tenn could have crushed its head in so easily at that moment. Let it “die” in disappointment. But suddenly she realized it had called her “Master” and she was curious.

“Why did you do it?”

“All the other me’s were eatin’ everything!” The SIR defended, “I wanted to eat more than them!”

So these faulty robots worked in a pack mentality. Would this SIR be considered an alpha, or the one who was just smart enough to keep quiet as the rest of the pack were killed? Either way, she considered dismantling the last standing robot. It was functional enough, but she couldn’t go around with this thing tagging along eating everything. Who was she, Zim? Ha!..

She wished she still had her original SIR unit...

“Aw, Master needs a hug!”

Tenn stiffened as the SIR suddenly ran up and latched onto her. She hadn’t expected something like that. But then she gathered her bearings and shoved it off.

“Get off of me!” She screeched, “You don’t do that! You’re not supposed to- where did you even learn that??”

“I ‘unno!” The robot answered, “But master’s sad, so I’m gonna hug you!”

Tenn was about to protest, when the robot had again wrapped itself around her narrow waist and gripped her tightly. She tried shoving it off, but found it suddenly too hard to do so. Seriously, where did it learn that?

Maybe it was because she was granted some time off from her mission, but her Pak did not not protest when she shut her eyes and hugged back. Her organic Irken head was suddenly flooding with emotions she knew she should resist, but couldn’t find the strength to do so. Emotions that made her want to protect this SIR unit. It lacked all reason and logic, but she was already growing attached and couldn’t let go. She hated herself for this.

But her more analytical, resourceful side came to the rescue with a compromise; test the SIR to see if it was at least useful to her.

“SIR..” she began.

“Zir!” The robot corrected.

Tenn was taken aback by the robot asserting itself, but recovered quickly. It was a default, after all, “Ok, Zir.. Come with me to the Armory. I need you to take apart every weapon capable of target-seeking technology, and find parts that can be used as spares for the Voot-Cruiser. Can you do that?”

“Okey-Dokie!” Zir screamed.

26 minutes later, Tenn had a surplus of parts for the Voot-Cruiser. And Zir had found a little black box that Tenn had turned into a makeshift radio to satisfy the robot’s need to absorb information. Though Tenn didn’t know what exactly Zir was learning from the Meekrob form of escapism about a murder mystery..

“No, not Beckalanis! She was my favoritest!!” Zir screamed during a particularly grating part of the program.

“Zir, calm down! I’m trying to focus!” Tenn ordered. All Invaders were expected to know every nook and cranny of their ship, but replacing those parts with scraps wasn’t exactly her strong-suit, her field of expertise being firearms and bio weapons. She really had to think about what she was doing, and fast. She wished she knew a little more about mechanical-engineering in times like this.

“Zim knows a thing or two about mechanical-engineering” The more traitorous part of her brain said. She shuddered. She refused to call the luckiest defect in the Irken Empire. It would just give him a giant ego-trip he didn’t need. Or deserve. Besides, she was already so close to figuring this out on her own!

“It’s the butler! Look out, Twiggly-Giggly-ton!!” Zir squeaked.

“Zir! Quiet!”

“Sorry!”

.... But she supposed it wouldn’t hurt if she made a pit-stop on the dirty planet he was stationed on and ordered him to provide her a temporary sanctuary... and maybe she could just leave her barely functional ship in his garage and let his obsessive-compulsive defective tendencies take over, making him fix her ship without asking him to... If he asked about her ship’s sorry state, she could just say that she had to scrap together what she could find from her destroyed base which was technically true..

And Zim had a defective SIR unit too. All the Invaders where there when he got it. She and Invader Larb even still talked about it every now and then... or, used to. Tenn didn’t think she could speak to another competent Invader for a while after today..

But surely, Zim must have fixed his SIR if he was still alive. And maybe the Tallest had sent him those broken SIR’s to be fixed. Robotics were one of Zim’s few specialties, why else would the Tallest send him those terrors? Some sort of prank? Unlikely. Stupid. Below them.

Visiting Zim was slowly becoming a very plausible reality and Tenn was slowly becoming more frustrated. But the combination of her own unnecessary feelings that wanted to keep the robot, and the sly PAK reasoning that it wasn’t plausible unless said robot was fixed, Zim was coming up to be the most likely solution to her current situation.

With the push of a button with more force than needed, Tenn’s ship sprung to life, and she couldn’t find it in herself to celebrate, knowing the next destination on her agenda. Defeated, she lurched into the cockpit and called her SIR.

“Where we goin’, Master?” It asked.

“Some filthy little planet known as Earth...” Tenn said, typing in commands to open the ceiling hatch and shoot out of the atmosphere before the Meekrob could catch on. She pushed another button that caused the remains of her base to go up in a fiery explosion.

“Oooooooo!!!” Zir marveled, “Pretty!”

“Yes, I guess my final act to inflict pain on this perilous planet could be counted as pretty... Petty would be a better fit.” Tenn explained as she set the coordinates for Earth. The ETA was about five months. Tenn sighed. It couldn’t be helped that she couldn’t find any scrapped engines with the capability for light speed in her base...

“Oh... I’m gonna list all the words that start with P now!!” Zir announced, “Pain, peril, pink, pig, people, play, pretty, p-“

Tenn groaned. It was going to be a long five months...

**Author's Note:**

> I’m trying to decide if this should be a Oneshot or not. If I continued I would probably add Tak in the mix. 
> 
> Also, I made Zir a little bit more intelligent and focused than Gir since it’s the upgraded version of him, but broken just the same. Free will makes you crazy and full of love <3


End file.
